Oren Klaff - Flip the Script: Persuade Anyone by Getting Them to Think Your Idea Is Their Idea

Heres the big idea in 81 words:

I dont like being pressured into making a purchase. And Im not alone. Over decades of being marketed, pitched, sold, and lied to, weve all grown resistant to sales persuasion. The moment we feel pressured to buy, we pull away. And if were told what to do or what to think, our defenses go up. In other words, buyers dont put much trust in you and your ideas. However, everyone trusts their own ideas.

Accordingly, today, products are bought, not sold.

If youre trying to make a deal in this environment, its never been harder. Buyers in your industry are skeptical of new products and services, and if youre the person who has to sell to them, theyll be skeptical of you as well. They fact-check everything you say, sometimes while youre saying it. And buyers are always looking for a better deal, thinking they can somehow improve on your offer, no matter how good it is.

Instead of pushing your idea on the buyer, its a better move to guide them to discover it on their own, so they believe it, trust it, and get excited about it. Then theyll want to buy it and will feel good about the chance to work with you.

This book is dedicated to showing you how to plant your idea in the mind of another so they will discover it, appreciate it, and fall in love with it on their own. But you cannot accomplish this with standard sales methods. Instead, you need to flip the script.

IM OREN KLAFF. Several years ago, I wrote a book called Pitch Anything, in which I taught readers a unique method to prepare and deliver a pitch that would wow buyers and investors every time. It was a method Id developed for myself in the world of tech, but it proved to be incredibly useful for others as well. As word spread about the effectiveness of Pitch Anything, soon over a million people were using it in their everyday business, and before I knew it, I was getting calls from people at companies like Google, Amazon, and Bank of America telling me how useful theyd found my method.

Next, companies from Germany, Italy, and Russia were calling. The result: I was being invited to help pitch large deals in far-flung parts of the world. Id never imagined my ideas would travel so far from Silicon Valley.

In the years since I wrote Pitch Anything, the marketplace has changed. Buyers have become more cold and digital, and so I have changed with them, creating new methods for closing deals. These new methods are what Ive put in this book.

Bluntly, heres the problem: Enthusiastic sellers make an impressive pitch but then quickly switch over to closing mode, applying just the kind of unwanted pressure that blows up deals these days faster than you can say Sign here. Or aspiring sellers will make the worlds greatest pitch and then stop, unsure of what to do next, hoping the deal will come through all on its own.

Both these approaches are the norm, and painful to watch. For that reason, I developed a revolutionary approach, a way to win every deal without spending a single moment selling or trying to closea way to sell without selling at all. In other words, the buyer feels its his or her idea to work with you and makes the deal happen. You dont apply pressure, try to overcome objections, or give chase.

So heres what I want you to understand right from the beginning of this book. Closing a deal without sales pressure is not a mystery. Its not some superpower that certain people have and others dont. Getting a deal done is a step-by-step process and its available to anybody who knows how to follow a few basic rules. Because once you know the rules, you never have to push someone to close; instead, you can make them feel like they came up with your idea themselves, which leads a deal to close naturally, as if it were always meant to happen. This ability to flip the script will help you in any situation and close any deal.

In this book, Im going to teach you those rules and show you the steps to persuade your prospects without pressuring them. First, Ill introduce the idea of Inceptionplanting an idea in someone elses brain. From there, Ill show you how to use the Dominance Hierarchy and the rules of Certainty to turn the tables and put yourself in a position of strength, instead of the buyer holding all the cards. Next, Ill demonstrate the power of a Pre-Wired Idea and how to make your deal feel Plain Vanilla, like its the most normal and obvious thing in the worldin other words, something your prospects mind can easily grasp. Then youll discover how to use the buyers natural Pessimism as a force in your favor, and how to be Compelling when it matters most. Finally, youll get to see how all these ideas work together as I describe in detail what can only be called the deal of a lifetime.

To protect the confidentiality of my clients and more effectively illustrate how you can apply these ideas, Ive changed many identifying details of people and companies involved and fictionalized some aspects of the stories. Nonetheless, every one of these examples is based on a real-life business deal in which I used these techniques effectively.

For example, let me tell you about the time I tried to sell a $10 million software deal to one of the most powerful men in Russia.